Jessie Munoz is not the youngest member of the Belmont Shore Railroad Club, that title belongs to an 8-year-old who recently joined the club. With 50 members, the club’s age range is from 8 to 94 with the distribution weighted at the end of the range. But Munoz is perhaps one of the longest-serving members, given that he joined as a teenager.
As the club’s president, he’s driven to draw more people to the club — ideally younger people — to pass on the knowledge and skills associated with old-school model-making.
Munoz’s love affair with modeling began with trains. His father was a longshore worker and he would take Munoz as a young boy of 5 or 6 years old to the docks with him to look at the ships he worked on coming in.
“He showed me the work that he did but I always stopped to turn around toward the railyards behind me to look at the trains going by,” Munoz explained. “Every young kid enjoys trains. I enjoyed it because I could see them close up. I was mesmerized by the size, the sound, and the smell of locomotives going by.”
Munoz, a San Pedro resident in his early ’60s, noted that as any young boy of his generation, he built model kits of tanks and planes. When he discovered he could work on trains the same way, he took on modeling trains as a hobby… even during his years in high school and college, he modeled to keep himself occupied.
At some point, after he joined the Belmont Shore Railroad Club, Munoz started traveling to see real trains as far away as Tehachapi, California, and Gallup, New Mexico to see real trains and photographing them.
“I tried to duplicate what I saw in my models,” Munoz said. “I started building custom locomotives and cars from photographs I’ve taken over the years. The more I did it, the more I enjoyed it.”
It was the mental/modeling challenge that drew Munoz.
“I’d photograph buildings in downtown LA and I would model them just because no one makes them. I enjoy making it look as realistic as possible,” Munoz said.
A Hobby From Humble Beginnings
To be a part of the Belmont Shore Railroad club you have to keep your status current by having building projects and completing something every year.
Dan Kamikubo built a 1950s version of downtown Long Beach, perhaps not an exact replica but perhaps one from an alternate universe. He contributed to many of the buildings that fill up the upstairs diorama.
Kamikubo worked outside for GTE (now Verizon) phone company for 44 years. He worked on many of the historic buildings in downtown Long Beach. As a result, the details of those buildings are etched into his memories.
As a child, he always wanted an American Flyer train set, but his parents couldn’t afford it. His father was a gardener. He acquired bits and pieces, first on an H0 scale — the average model rail car is about 8 inches long or almost twice the size of an N-Scale, which is 1:160 the size of the real thing. H0 scale is 1:87. Dan noted that the nice thing about his youth was that there were hobby magazines in the libraries and school libraries… there was one called Model Railroading.
“But today, everything is online and digital, you can’t get it in print form,” Kamikubo said.
The downtown diorama is incredibly detailed, right down to the errant shopping baskets and gas pumps at 1950s-era gas stations, named after club members who’ve passed on.
“I remember downtown Long Beach where they had used car lots all the way up Long Beach Boulevard,” Kamikubo said.
How it Got to San Pedro
The club was formed in the Belmont Shore Library in 1971. According to Kamikubo, the club struggled to find a permanent home after being forced out. Their next home was Bob’s Hobby Shop on 4th Street (no longer there). Then the club moved to Signal Hill but was kicked out of there. Then the City of Bell gave the club a big warehouse for a while until the club was told something else had to be there. The club finally settled in San Pedro in 1981, right about the time the upper reservation of Fort MacArthur was shut down and given to the city by the Army, and the railroad club was given permanent facilities in what became Angels Gate Park with the help of Mayor Tom Bradley.
Late Bloomer Into the Hobby
The Model Railroad Association regularly organizes informative seminars while various local railroad clubs around Southern California put on home tours featuring railroad dioramas in their houses.
Joe Wolar guestimates that about 20% of attendees are young adults, while the rest are Baby Boomers.
“That’s why we’ve actually started opening our clubhouse on Saturday afternoons from 12 to 4 p.m.,” Wolar said. “They can come by and see us run the trains and we’re going to start a program where we demonstrate how to get into it.”
This hobby seems cost-prohibitive, but it doesn’t have to be. Wolar says to start small. He said a hobby could start as small as a 2-inch pizza box with a circular track with foam installation as the model landscape surrounding it — a little project that could be done in a matter of a couple of hours. Once you learn it, it becomes a skill you never forget.
Given the nature of their hobby and all of the museums in San Pedro and beyond in the Los Angeles Harbor Area, it’s surprising that this hobby isn’t utilized more, (Think Banning Museum, Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, or even LAMI.)
In the past, however, the club has worked with Operation Lifesaver with Pacific Railroad (formerly Southern Pacific Railroad). They used to conduct safety seminars.
The Intimate Relationship Between Creator and Creation
For the past year or two, modeling and the club have been a refuge for Munoz as his wife recovers from cancer.
“Last year, I took about six months from work and prior to that, I missed a lot of time from work. But while I was home taking care of her, that was my therapy, working on my models,” Munoz said. “I enjoy the club. I enjoy my friendship with all my friends here and I enjoy sharing my hobby and everything that I learned. To me, it’s exciting.”
Recently, Joe built a top handler for a friend who is a longshore worker, just to do it.
“Now I’m going to build more because I enjoyed it. But I guess It’s therapy,” Munoz said.
Munoz’s wife is a survivor and is doing well but still has another surgery coming up.
“It has brought me a lot of faith,” Munoz said. “It has gotten me onto the path of God and this has brought my friends closer to me.”
The top handler was created using a 3D printer, an idea brought to him by a young person. Munoz painted, sanded, and decaled it to finish the dockside vehicle.
Hobby purists would look down on using 3D printers, but Munoz sees it as an opportunity to connect with future hobbyists and pass on the joy and intimacy that is formed between creator and creation by using the old ways and techniques of model-making.
Munoz agreed, explaining that you could 3D print to anything you want by photographing it and designing it, but the level of detail from “scratch building” (modelers call anything “scratch building” when each piece is uniquely made from anything else)…
“When you 3D print something you have one master plan or design that you print from,” Munoz explained. “But when you make something yourself, you have to go out there and do the research, the measuring, the paint and you have to cut, sand, and shape it to make it the way you want it to be. So every step of the way it’s like building a house.”
“Like, when I built my model of the building upstairs,” referring to the 1940s era downtown Long Beach.
“I had to build within it 2-by-4 frames to support the plastic exterior just like you would do a real house, and I never knew that was involved until I started building it,” Munoz explained. “And everything has to be supportive and done properly. 3D printing is easy, quick, and simple but when you model it from scratch you’re learning aspects that you can use in other parts of your life, like building a house. It sounds silly, but it’s true.”
To be clear, while 3D printing is a modern miracle of invention, products of 3D printing are still unfinished products, since you still have to weather them, paint them, and decal them, before they can be considered a finished product.
The difference here… there’s an intimate relationship that is made between creator and creation, a relationship that is intimate and filled with joy and characterized by the creator’s deep knowledge and understanding of the creation.
“If I were to build something and I would build a second model from scratch, it wouldn’t exactly be the same,” Munoz explained. “They’ll be something I’ve modeled that I’ve learned from the first model or something. I could improve on a second model … but never are my two models the same.”
Munoz recalled a graffitied locomotive he modeled that was on display upstairs. He had gone to downtown Torrance and photographed the locomotive from all angles, then went home with his airbrush, decals, and paint pens and duplicated the locomotive in miniature.
“Step by step, I always refer back to the photograph and add that little detail that I overlooked,” Munoz said.
Munoz’s biggest desire, now that he is club president, is to reach out to people who may have forgotten the hobby, don’t know the hobby, and introduce model building, not just trains that the club is known for.
“We have ships, buildings, planes, all aspects of tanks. It’s model building and it’s a great way to escape reality in life,” Munoz explained. “Nowadays, with everything going on in the world. It’s kind of nice to sit behind a desk and work on your project and unwind.”
Munoz is a father to five children and numerous grandchildren. But none of them have picked up modeling as a hobby yet. Right now it’s just Nintendo game systems, Pokemon cards, and cartoons.
But hopefully, one day when they get older, they will come back. After they discover girls or boys they’ll come back and discover modeling again.